English Teacher’s Page

Please bookmark this page for access to free lesson packages! And please contact me if you would like to suggest a topic for an upcoming lesson package.

How do we encourage our students to love language and literature? Sometimes that’s a challenge for us because we’ve loved reading forever, and we just don’t always understand students who don’t. I retired in June 2016, and I hope to “pay it forward.” My own English teachers taught me to love reading and writing, and I want to share some of what I think are my best ideas for reaching those children who need us most.

I will periodically offer lessons that I developed in my 39 years as an English teacher. I know that teachers, especially those in rural areas, don’t have the resources to purchase lesson packages and that, even when they do, the quality of a lot of what’s out there is often geared toward test prep and just isn’t that great.

I’ll begin by offering a few free lesson packages, and I will rotate these periodically. (Note: These lessons are packaged in PowerPoint presentations. All handouts are embedded, and they can only be downloaded when the PowerPoint is not in Slideshow mode.)

I hope that you’ll download them and adapt them for your own students. All I ask is that you write me on on my contact page and let me know if you found them useful for your students. (And if you think it might interest you, please check out today’s blog, where the topics are usually about education, family, faith, or politics.)

Evaluating Video Sources–Perhaps the most important lesson we can teach our students in an age where they get their information from online sources is how to recognize whether a video is objective and credible. This lesson package offers resources for helping students recognize biases in videos that purport to be informational or news pieces.

As the new school year begins, I plan to upload lessons on other types of writing, on how to teach language concepts inductively, and on other discussion techniques for specific literary works (including contemporary ones by diverse authors). Please bookmark this page if you think it will be useful to you.